Age: 38
female
Vanessa Nuala Kirby is an English actress. She rose to international prominence with her portrayal of Princess Margaret in the Netflix drama series The Crown (2016–2017), for which she won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress. For her performance in the film Pieces of a Woman (2020), she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Kirby made her professional acting debut on stage, with acclaimed performances in the plays All My Sons (2010), A Midsummer Night's Dream (2010), Women Beware Women (2011), Three Sisters (2012), and as Stella Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (2014). She also appeared in the action films Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), Hobbs & Shaw (2019), and The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025), and portrayed Empress Joséphine in the historical drama Napoleon (2023). Description above from the Wikipedia article Vanessa Kirby, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Joan Goodwin, a thoughtful and reserved professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, has always been captivated by the stars. Content in her quiet academic life and her role as a devoted aunt, Joan’s world shifts when she sees an ad calling for the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Compelled by a long-held dream, she applies—and is chosen from thousands in the summer of 1980—launching her into an intense new chapter as a trainee astronaut at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. There, Joan joins a remarkable group of candidates, including Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond, easygoing scientist John Griffin, guarded but brilliant Lydia Danes, kind-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, and the enigmatic engineer Vanessa Ford. As they train, Joan forms unexpected bonds, discovers a new passion, and finds a love that changes her understanding of herself and her place in the universe. But when disaster strikes during mission STS-LR9 in December 1984, Joan’s journey takes a sudden and profound turn.
